Developing daily habits among your audiences drives retention, and as Greg Piechota of INMA has said, retention will make publishers more money than higher ARPU. Push notifications and other app messaging can be a powerful tool for building those habits, with the most successful publishers seeing twice as much engagement as poor performers. To understand what drives success, Pugpig partnered with Airship, OneSignal, PushPushGo and Pushly and found:
- The rewards outweigh the risks. – While most news publishers use push notifications, others are more reluctant, especially those with less frequent publishing schedules. The report proves the rewards from push notifications and other app messaging are much greater than any perceived risks.
- Use app messaging to build habits immediately. – Airship found that the first 48 hours after downloads are critical to engaging new users with an app. Multi-channel onboarding messaging, including email, in-app messaging and push notifications, builds the engagement necessary to make your app part of a new user’s daily habits.
- Relevance drives messaging success. – The report includes three case studies, and the common thread is that successful publishers employed tactics to increase the relevance of their messages.
The insights are included in a report on app messaging best practices, which includes clear guidance on how to use app messaging to increase engagement and retention to achieve your editorial and commercial goals.
Why publishers should use push notifications
In working with publishers to increase engagement with their apps, we knew push notifications were a powerful tool. After one publisher started using them, they saw a 60% increase in active users over three months. The 2024 State of Mobile Publishing Report revealed that publishing brands that successfully optimize mobile app push notifications had more than twice as high audience engagement.
We wanted to uncover tactics that could elevate the performance of more publishers, so we dug into data from more than 350 media apps built by Pugpig. We also partnered with Airship, OneSignal, PushPushGo and Pushly to get further insights from thousands of apps and billions of users around the world.
As Eric Ulken, Vice President of Product at the Baltimore Banner told us for the report: “(Apps are) the only platform that we are able to push, bring people in without having to voluntarily follow a link. Newsletters to an extent, yes, but push notifications are more effective at bringing people back.”
This led us to ask what drove the performance of the most successful publishers. We also wanted to answer the question from some publishers who were worried that using push notifications would not only drive users to opt out of push but also delete the app.
In truth, we did find one specific use of push that drove up app uninstalls: If a publisher sent push messages linked to gated content to nonsubscribers, churn increased.
Apart from this churn-inducing use case, we haven’t found evidence that push notifications drive uninstalls.
Build habits immediately
Airship has found more risk in not using, compared to using, push notifications. While app audiences are typically publishers’ most loyal users, they can’t take that for granted. Airship’s data shows the first 48 hours are critical in building habits that keep new users engaged with the app.
App onboarding screens that include prompts to encourage users to opt into push notifications, customise the app and provide information on how to use it are key. Successful publishers such as Boston Globe and Minnesota Star Tribune have onboarding screens or pop-ups that ask users to opt into and customise push notifications the first time they open the app.
According to OneSignal, in addition to higher push opt-in rates, apps with onboarding messages have 56.25% higher stickiness measured by the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users than apps that don’t.
Messaging providers have found in their research that the most successful app onboarding sequences use multiple forms of messaging including email, push notifications and in-app messages. Notably, publishers should increase their adoption of in-app messaging because it doesn’t require app users to opt in, unlike push notifications. Plus, using multiple communications channels increases engagement by 37%, leading to higher 1-day, 7-day and 30-day app retention, OneSignal has found.
Relevance is the key driver of push performance
We used data from the messaging providers to identify the most successful publishers using our app platform based on push notification open rates. Airship has found that personalisation boosts open rates by 37% on average. When we reached out to the best-performing publishers, we found the common thread between them was that they employed different methods to increase the relevance of their messaging, although they employed different tactics.
- ACCA Student Accountant used an Airship scene to allow students to identify if they are currently studying for an exam.
- City AM uses content strategy and click-through data from its newsletters to inform the stories they push.
- The Boston Globe started allowing users to choose which push notifications they received using a preference centre. Open rates increased by up to three times.
Their success in using relevance to drive higher push notification open rates has led to higher engagement and growth in their app audience. The Boston Globe has been so successful in increasing their app audience that they dedicated a staff member to focus on optimising their app even more.
While we started this research looking to investigate push notification best practices, it quickly became obvious that publishers have several other app messaging opportunities to foster loyalty and habit with their apps such as Apple’s Live Activities. You might be familiar with them from delivery, ride-sharing or navigation apps when the app presents constantly updated information on the lock screen. News publishers have used these to show live updates of sports events and elections. As with other app messaging options, Live Activities have been shown to increase engagement.
- Sports apps featuring live activities have 3.7x more sessions than those without them, according to Airship.
- Across all types of apps, OneSignal found that apps that use them have a 23.7% higher retention rate.
Google plans to add a similar feature in Android, which it calls Ongoing Notifications. The feature is planned for Android 16, which is scheduled to be released in the second quarter of 2025.
The report contains more details about the case studies as well as benchmarks and best practices about:
- The best time to send push notifications
- The ideal length of push notifications
- The best size for images in push notifications.
You can download the full report to get all of the insights about how to use app messaging to achieve your app engagement, retention and growth goals.
